Indigenous Knowledge, Performance Art and the Faltering Act of Translation
(2019)
author(s): Lea Kantonen, Pekka Kantonen
published in: RUUKKU - Studies in Artistic Research
In collaboration with Wixárika teachers and community museum planners we have planned and carried out performance art events in which video footage on pedagogical situations is screened and the teachers explain and practically demonstrate to the audience what happens in the footage – in Dwight Conquergood´s words the teachers "perform their own experience". They present and contextualize the knowledge we have recorded together with them in a fieldwork situation. It is important that our Wixarika co-performers themselves perform as the experts and teachers of the knowledge both in the live event and in the video footage. They have studied both formally in a university and non-formally as apprentices in the shamanistic institution of rukuri+kate that can be dated back to pre-colonial times. We artists-researchers function as documentarists and translators, often hesitating between different translation options. The significations vary from one language to another, from one translation to another. The translation is performed as a hesitant act, open for different meanings.